I can now die a happy man...

... because a few days ago MadPriest mentioned me and my blog for this clip.

Church shopping

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Obama's New Church

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HT to Episcopal Cafe. And a double HT to Fr. Charles for being the silliest cleric on the clip. Another Episcopal inaugural coup!

Art imitating life imitating art

Bill Lewellis, Missioner for Communications and Canon Theologian for the Diocese of Bethlehem sent this video around the DioBeth listserve this afternoon:



I wrote back to the list the following:

"Funny you should post this, Bill."

Last fall, journalists and others began to notice a strange coincidence between the show "The West Wing" and then candidate and later president-elect Obama. As NPR said, "it turns out to be less like a case of life imitating art. It's more like art imitating life." According to the same report, the parallels really begin at the end of the shows run:

The final season of The West Wing centered around "a young, charismatic candidate from an ethnic minority [Matthew Santos], daring to take on an establishment workhorse with a promise to transcend race and heal America's partisan divide."

Hmmm. Sounds like something I've heard about ... maybe that's why the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama seems like deja vu all over again.

On October 29, 2008, Brian Selter of the NYTimes wrote "Following the Script-Obama, McCain and the West Wing:"

Mr. Attie, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, and Mr. Axelrod, a political consultant, had crossed campaign trails before. "I just called him and said, 'Tell me about Barack Obama,' " Mr. Attie said.

Days after Mr. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, delivered an address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the two men held several long conversations about his refusal to be defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the partisan divide. Mr. Axelrod was then working on Mr. Obama's campaign for the United States Senate; he is now Mr. Obama'a chief strategist.

Four years later, the writers of "The West Wing" are watching in amazement as the election plays out. The parallels between the final two seasons of the series (it ended its run on NBC in May 2006) and the current political season are unmistakable. Fiction has, once again, foreshadowed reality.

The Guardian interviewed Attie who admitted that he drew inspiration for the Congressman Matt Santos character from then-Senator Barack Obama.

"I drew inspiration from him in drawing this character," West Wing writer and producer Eli Attie told the Guardian. "When I had to write, Obama was just appearing on the national scene. He had done a great speech at the convention [which nominated John Kerry] and people were beginning to talk about him...."

..."Some of Santos's insistence on not being defined by his race, his pride in it even as he rises above it, came from that," Attie said.

The scriptwriter also borrowed from Obama's life the notion of a superstar candidate. "After that convention speech, Obama's life changed. He was mobbed wherever he went. He was more than a candidate seeking votes: people were seeking him. Some of Santos's celebrity aura came from that."

Not only that, the inspiration for "West Wing" Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman was drawn from a one-time Clinton staffer and now Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. The Times of London said:

The inspiration for The West Wing's fictional deputy chief-of-staff, Josh Lyman, the most unlikely moments in the character's story are plucked straight out of Mr Emanuel's reality.

And

Although Mr Emanuel shares his Jewish heritage with Lyman, his faith runs far deeper than that of his on-screen counterpart. A devout Jew, he reportedly obtained a special waiver from his rabbi in order to work through the holiday of Rosh Hashanah during the $800 billion Wall Street bailout.

In Ronald Reagan, we had a president who was an actor. We have seen many actors portray many past-presidents. We have even seen actors play imaginary presidents. But in Obama, we have a president who portrayed by an actor (Jimmy Smits) even before he ran for president!

Bishop Gene goes to Washington

Updated: Bishop Gene Robinson wrote on his blog, which he started for Lambeth but reactived for the inauguration, to share a glimpse of what it was like for him to give the invocation at the "We Are One" concert Sunday. He mentions only in passing the news that he was moved ahead of the broadcast and nothing of the subsequent flap and appearing to be censored.

Here is the link to his post...please go read it. Here a some pictures from Susan Russell's blog.

Here is Rachel Maddows report on what happened and how Obama's team will try to make it right. As you can tell from my rant yesterday I was very...disappointed.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

The thing I appreciate about Bishop Gene's description is his ability to be present in even a rarefied situation. When others (like me) would be doing reasonable imitations of goldfish, he appears to have kept his cool. Which seems to be a trait he shared with the president-elect.

The other thing is that Obama people stepped up, saw their (HBOs?) mistake and took responsibility to fix it. If things go according to plan, his invocation will be heard on the Mall again today when the concern is re-played (in full) on jumbotrons scattered about the Mall.

So now, let's take time to pray, watch and pray some more for our nation on this historic day.

Update Here is Bishop Robinson on The Daily Show:

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Bishop Gene Robinson

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Here is Bishop Gene's blog post describing his experience of inauguration day.

Reality check

HBO pushed Bishop Gene Robinson's invocation off the air. The "We Are One" concert that was supposed to kick off Barack Obama's inauguration celebration at the Lincoln Memorial with a blow out concert. Robinson's prayer was supposed to act as a counterweight to Rick Warren's scheduled invocation at the swearing-in ceremony itself. Whether or not one agrees with Robinson, religious people everywhere...especially those who are concerned with the place of religious engagement in the public square...should be concerned.

HBO did not even include the prayer in the edited re-broadcast of the concert later that night.

It appears that Robinson was asked to begin "pre-concert" events, but as you can see from the video above, no one assumed that anything had begun yet, and even the local sound crews were caught off guard because they had not even switched on the speaker tower near the Washington Monument.

One lesson in this fiasco is this: God wants us to be in the public square. God needs us to speak both blessing and warning, and to speak truth to power. We should not confuse a seat at the high table for doing what God needs us to be doing. Especially when table host might pull the seat out from under us.

There are two prevailing theories that I am reading in the blogosphere: it was a conspiracy by HBO who moved the prayer to ten minutes ahead of curtain to be sure it would not be on TV. (HBO blames in Inauguration Committee.) Or it was either a decision by Obama people to move the Bishop forward (They blame HBO.)

Maybe HBO only wanted to show entertainers and that Barack can speak to us in the current civil religion that really matters: entertainment. Besides, one of HBO's most popular shows is hosted by Bill Maher is hosted by evangelical atheist who thinks religion is a mental disorder and who will only engage religionists who are obviously ignorant, silly or weird. The day he engages (and listens to) the intelligent and thoughtful religious is the day he stops being an entertainer. Maher and Rush Limbaugh inhabit the same form of opinion shapers...those who package their opinions as "entertainment" so they are exempt from their responsibilities when their views come home to roost.

HBO is, after all, in the entertainment business but it is also a shaper of secular thought without reference to religion or faith in any serious way. They will engage serious issues of sexuality when it's Six Feet Under or depict homosexual rape on Oz or give time to Maher to castigate religious bigots. They only want to engage issues, provocatively or not, on their own terms. HBO had a chance to show an inclusive religious leader in a gay-friendly light, in an entertainment context and they dodged it. Given a chance to avoid serious theological engagement and they took it. That they threw the LGBT community under the bus in the process was, well, unfortunate.

But HBO was not alone.

Maybe the Obama people are terrified that their president will do anything to avoid the kind of thing that happened to Bill Clinton very early in his first term...remember the "gays in the military" flap that ended up with the disastrous don't-ask-don't-tell policy? Maybe they are more afraid that being seen with Bishop Robinson is more dangerous to Obama that being seen on stage with He-Who-Sounds-Moderate, Rick Warren?

Maybe Obama's handlers are just tired of Obama getting in trouble over his choice of pastors?

Was this a political pragmatism packaged as a screw-up? Or was it a freudian screw-up...one that tells us more of what's really on people's minds?

You know, I've done enough of these public invocations to know that the organizers often want it to be over and done with ASAP. These invocations are not meant to be deep worship experiences. It doesn't matter if it is Veteran's Day event, the dedication of a hospital wing, or the Rotary Club prayer...these things are more are less window dressing. But at least when I prayed at Rotary it was after the bell had rung and people stopped eating their rubber chicken for a minute. Gene did not even get as much time as the set-piece preacher in soap opera wedding scene.

Which is more shameful? The stunning insult to the gay community or the stunning insult to religiosity in general? The message of the concert was pretty clear. We are one, unless you are gay. We are one, unless you are religious. Citizenship doesn't even make us one. What makes us one is that we all like a free concert.

So my expectation is this: the religious voice that will get the most attention will be the respectable white evangelical guy from the mega-church and the big religious news of the day will be that his prayer will not be not as offensive or exclusive as it might have been.

People will, rightly, focus on the slight to gay and lesbian people in how this was handled. And I hope responsible journalists press for some answers and make some people feel the shame.

But we who are called to follow Christ in a post-Christian, post-religious world--a place where the supermarket of ideas is stacked against serious religious inquiry--should take note. For politicians, media execs and producers, religion is a set piece to be used or not used according to the message that want conveyed.

It is perhaps a healthy lesson on the day before the inauguration of a person in whom many of us have invested so much hope. As the psalmist says:

No king is saved by the size of his army;
no warrior escapes by his great strength.

A horse is a vain hope for deliverance;
despite all its great strength it cannot save.
Psalm 33:16-17

As Gene himself said in his prayer, Barak is many things, many of them good, but a savior he ain't.

See the coverage at the Episcopal Cafe for more.

A porpoise driven life

I think I have the killer curriculum for my next adult education series.



From the book jacket: "Just like Prosperity preaching, the Porpoise-driven life uses all kinds of bible translations to make you feel like it's truly biblical..."

HT to Scott Allen via Facebook and others.

Thirty Days...

...until pitchers and catchers report for spring training!

Just as we are hit with a major arctic blast...there is hope in the Church of Baseball.

Please support a good thing

I like the Geranium Farm, and not just because the first plant I ever planted and grew successfully was a geranium. That the plant grew and survived and tolerated being hauled around from classroom to home and eventually to dorm rooms and back again was probably more a testament to the generosity and durability of the geranium rather than to my gardening skills. So I have fondness for the things.

Here is what Barbara Cawthorne Crafton says about Geraniums:

What a thing to say about geraniums. Salt of the earth, geraniums: solid citizens of the plant world, faithful friends of humanity. More than a century of service without a murmur in the windows of countless public schools, growing taller and spindlier than most supermodels from straining for the light, neglected over vacations until somebody tosses an offhanded Dixie cup of water onto their gasping roots. But pinch them down and they set blooms in a day or two, so grateful for the attention that they don't complain about the amputation. Most people should be so stalwart.

They don't smell good. They don't smell good? Geraniums smell glorious! They smell of dusty sunlight, of the tangy, spicy energy of life. They eschew the effete sweetness of other flowers, flowers that pander to our indolence. Geraniums smell militantly beautiful, a smell of productivity under extreme circumstances, a smell that says Don't bother about me, I'll be all right. Take care of the weaker ones. Geraniums never whine about insects and fungi. They take care of themselves. You don't have to hover over them like an anxious nurse, begging them to grow, feeding them special treats. Not geraniums. No, no thanks, they say, I just ate, really. Couldn't touch another bite.

In my humble opinion Barbara's daily e-mo's, and her other work on retreats and meditations, belong in that unique and wonderful form of American literature that is occupied by the likes Will Rogers, Garrison Keillor and James Thurber...people who find humor and grace in even the most everyday things, only with a decidedly gentle Christian view. She writes about vestry-meetings, life with cats, and baking things. She writes about everyday encounters with with ordinary things that show us the love and power of God. God shows up here; so, yes, God shows up everywhere. Incarnation is like that.

Barbara has also gathered around her a talented group of people who love to write, cook, pray and create. It is one of my daily stops in my own morning devotions.

The Farm shows me that even my fallibilities, limitations and foibles are used and usable by God. The Farm is full of funny, gentle, touching and sometimes pointed reminders that the fullness of the Incarnation is often found in the most everyday things.

So here is my plea. My unsolicited plug. The Geranium Farm doesn't charge for you to read it and you don't need to subscribe. Like a lot of us who write, create and toil on these cyber-communities, we are happy to offer what we offer with the prayer that it might make a difference. Sometimes we write because we can't help it. We love it and are called to the keyboard. But The Farm is more than one person's blog. It really is a ministry and a community. So together, gentle Christians, let's support a good thing. It doesn't take much money to keep the Farm going, but it does take some. If you find the Geranium Farm refreshing and renewing, please support it.

Here is what Barbara said at the end of today's e-Mo:

In 2007, the Geranium Farm conducted a modest online fund drive, and we received enough donations to pay all our bills for more than a year -- Internet expense, travel, modest office expenses and (full disclosure) Barbara Crafton's pension payments. Now it's 2009, and we are finally running low on the nest egg that Farmers so generously provided two years ago. This year we will again host an event at the Episcopal Church's General Convention, which will have a modest cost. If the eMos, the HodgePodge, Ways of the World, sermon and ER&D meditations, prayer candles -- all of the interesting mix that is the Farm -- matters to you as it does to thousands of readers worldwide, might you consider sending a small gift to help it all continue? Visit the donations page at www.geraniumfarm.org or send a check to The Geranium Farm, 387 MIddlesex Avenue, Metuchen NJ 08840. We would be very grateful.

Thanks.

The "why" of evangelism

Father Matthew on the "why" of Evangelism.

Yelling (or bombing) never reconciled anything

Maybe it's me but it looks like atheists are becoming downright evangelical. If they’re not careful, they might start haranguing and threatening us believers if we don’t see things their way. Oops. Maybe they already are. But right now, they rely mostly to sarcasm and condescension. But before you know it, they’ll be acting downright religious. One atheist has even resorted to mass-marketing.

Last week, an television writer who is also an atheist decided to buy advertising on London double-decker buses. The ads rolled out last week. The text says:

There is probably no God.
Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Well, you can be shocked, if you want, but we did this to ourselves. The creator of the atheist (or more accurately, the agnostic) bus ads, Ariane Sherine, said she decided to do this in response to another national ad campaign last June by a network of evangelical Christian groups. They also put evangelistic signs on buses and the underground. Evidently the ads, web sites and toll-free phone numbers all warned unbelievers that they were going to hell for their sins.

At least that’s what Ms. Sherine says she heard. I don’t know because the offending ads aren’t on the internet. But it would not surprise me. Christians often fall back on threats of hell or fear of death or fear of the unknown or anxiety about change all in an attempt to get people to sign up and follow the King of Peace.

I remember a New Yorker cartoon that showed something like an Aztec temple. You know: a pyramid with the steps and a big altar of sacrifice shaped like a skull. Two guys in feathered headdresses and medals are sitting next to each other with the chins in the hands. One says to the other: “I wonder why we aren’t getting new converts?”

The competing London bus ads show us that not only did threats and manipulation in the name of the Gospel not work, it provoked exactly the opposite response! The lesson here is that you don’t change people’s minds by yelling at them.

But it could be worse. Just as we cannot change peoples minds by yelling at them, neither can we bomb or terrorize our way to peace—as we are learning once again in Gaza. Have you ever noticed that when people’s safety is directly threatened they become more hardened and more determined? The Israelis know that every car bomb and every missile only hardens their resolve and yet they try to bomb their way to peace. Our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said

Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded the world that “an eye for an eye soon leaves the whole world blind.” May we seek to end this blinding violence.

She echoes the Bishops, Patriarchs and heads of Christian churches in Jerusalem who say:

We believe that the continuation of this bloodshed and violence will not lead to peace and justice but breed more hatred and hostility -- and thus continued confrontation between the two peoples.

And they ought to know. They live there and if anyone is caught in crossfire between dueling religions and nationalisms, it is the Christians of Palestine.

But there is another way and will be shown this way again and again during the season after the Epiphany. This is the season when we discover again how people first came to know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

Over the next several Sundays, we will hear of Jesus calling disciples by name and showing that he knows the needs of their hearts. Jesus will encounter evil face to face and cast it out of people who were thought to be condemned to it. Jesus will heal the sick and care for those who unclean, even forgiving their sins. At last we hear how the disciples began to understand the divinity in Jesus on the mountaintop is directly connected to the mercy and love of God shown in how Jesus was with all kinds of people.

Have you ever noticed that Jesus’ first act in his public ministry is an act of submission and reconciliation? Think about it. We are so used to thinking of Jesus as the continuation of John’s preaching that we forget that at first the two sects were most probably competitors. John came preaching a message of warning; Jesus came preaching good news. John condemned sinners; Jesus forgave them. John lived apart from what he saw as a corrupt society; Jesus lived in it, to the point of eating and drinking in homes of both the powerful and the outcast.

Think of how it might have been: Jesus could have preached against John…pointed out their differences, ridiculed John's funny dress and weird diets all in an attempt to show how Jesus’ way is better than John’s way. But instead of endless rhetorical diatribes against one another, Jesus chooses to submit himself to John. He comes to John and asks to be baptized. Instead of turning John, with his different message and approach, into a competitor, he makes John’s message part and parcel of the good news Jesus brings.

We see this repeated again in our lesson from Acts. Luke tells us in Acts that Paul and Apollos started the congregation in Corinth from a group of followers of John the Baptist. They did it not by beating up on them but by starting where this group was and building on it.

What would the church today look like if we acted the same way? What if faithful people who disagreed with each other on ritual or sexuality or mission strategy chose, instead of fighting with harsh words, schism and legal action, chose instead to see the fundamental faithfulness in each other? What if we saw in each other—and stayed focused on—the deep desire to not only do good but to follow Christ and to make him known? What if we built on our gifts and learned from each other instead of trying to denigrate one another for the sake of deep principle? What if we submitted ourselves to each other the way John the Baptist and Jesus did with each other? What would our common life and our witness look like?

We already know. Actually, more times than not Christians who have vastly different points of view collaborate all the time. I see this among our downtown clergy and among those who share ministry in the local hospital, in the county jail, and who work to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless.

I have previously mentioned to you the observation that Bishop Paul made on Christmas Eve. He said the early Church grew the fastest even before there was an organized church, before they had the Creeds and even before they had a New Testament because Christians were known for their unfailing generosity and mercy especially to those outside the church. They cared for widows and they saved abandoned babies from garbage heaps and cared for the sick even if it meant risking their own lives. Just like Jesus, the earliest Christians shared the Gospel by sharing their lives, by being compassionate to all comers and generous in their mercy.

Given the choice between dueling ads and dueling missiles, I will choose the buses every time, but both events, one trivial and one deadly, point to the same truth. We often reduce reconciliation to the feeling we get when the other guy comes around to our point of view. Or the feeling we get when find people who agree with us. Reconciliation is not a competition to see who will be right first or win more people to my side...especially when we think our side happens to be the same as God’s.

Jesus’ work of reconciliation began with his baptism, and (wouldn't you know it?) our work of reconciliation began with our own baptisms. Jesus didn’t wait until we woke up and “got it” before he accepts us. No, God started where we are, often at our most helpless and builds us from there. For those of us who did have a wake up experience (and God bless you for it) please note that God still met you right where you were…even when you were at your worst.

Over the next few weeks, listen to how Jesus changes people. Listen to how Jesus changes us. It is not harangue that changes us but it is reconciling relationship and submission, even submission to a cross, that makes us new.

Non-negotiables?

Updated. Martin E. Marty wrote the following for his e-newsletter "Sightings" published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Marty poses the question of how Christians should communicate their religious convictions when it comes to social policy in the public square, especially when the public square exists in a pluralistic environment.

In other words, when a Christian is opposed to (or in favor) of a policy, is it enough to simply quote the Bible (as I or my group understands it), the magisterium, the Book of Common Prayer or some other religious authority that only my group recognizes? Marty says no. Not in a democracy. Apparently, he is not alone. At least among Chicagoans.

Marty writes:

Long-time subscribers know that Monday Sightings does not "do" U.S. Presidents or presidential candidates, but this twilight moment after an election and before an inauguration provides me with another category, "President-Elect," which today's column will notice for an important reason. That reason? The approach to religion-and-politics proposed by President-Elect Obama in his "Call to Renewal" address on May 28, 2006. I may print it out and use my new Christmas-gift magnets to affix it to a refrigerator door as a text for morning meditations. Here is an excerpt:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. Democracy requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all...Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what's possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It's the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God's edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one's life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy-making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing."

Now, contrast this with a message posted by the Reverend Pastor Richard Duane Warren, with whom I have no motive to pick a fight. But I wish he would engage in dialogue with his friend, the President-elect, before and after Inauguration Day. Warren:

"As church leaders, we know our congregations are not allowed to endorse specific candidates, and it's important for us to recognize that there can be multiple opinions among Bible-believing Christians when it comes to debatable issues such as the economy, social programs, Social Security, and the war in Iraq. But for those of us who accept the Bible as God's Word and know that God has a unique, sovereign purpose for every life, I believe there are five issues that are non-negotiable. To me, they're not even debatable because God's Word is clear on these issues."

These have to do with abortion, stem-cell harvesting, homosexual "marriage," human cloning, and euthanasia. He chose these five, about which the printed Bible displays only a few inches of text that can even be used as inferences to support them, as "non-negotiable" themes. He shelves as negotiable the multiple yards of printed biblical texts on some social issues which to him seem negotiable. With the President-Elect I affirm that Pastor Warren's "uncompromising commitments may be sublime," but I do see that "to base our policy-making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing."

We Bible-believing Christians are offended when some Muslims base social and political policy on the Qur'an, or ruling parties in India, on texts from their holy books, since we do not accept such texts as "God's Word." What Pastor Warren and millions in his camp advocate works only in a theocracy, where the whole population accepts or is forced to accept one faith's "God's Word." I really, really would like to eavesdrop if the President-Elect and the Pastor were to converse about this question.

So this is Pastor Warren's position: it is possible for Christians of conscience to disagree about questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, about which the Bible has much to say, and even about the roles of men and women in the church and the response of the Church to the government about which the Bible says less. It appears that we can even agree to disagree about slavery. But about abortion, stem-cell harvesting, homosexual "marriage," human cloning, and euthanasia on which the Bible says even less, these are to Warren "non-negotiables" among ourselves and therefore "non-negotiables" among citizens even if they are not our co-religionists.

Questions of realistic social policy and civil discourse aside, is this even Biblical? I don't see this view as jiving with, for one thing, Paul's instructions to his churches at all.

Read Obama's "Call to Renewal" address here.

See the whole column here.

Branding Jesus

Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is director of the Two Futures Project. He is an ordained Baptist preacher and author of Brand Jesus: Christianity in a Consumerist Age (Seabury Press). He is featured as the cover story in the latest Christianity Today.

Wigg-Stevenson describes the traps and challenges of attempting to do evangelism in a culture defined by consumerism. In a world where people understand spirituality in terms of life-style and consumer choice then people become "spiritual consumers" who understand their spiritual quest not so much in terms of ultimate questions but more in terms of experience, satisfaction and brand-choice.

Here are excerpts:

This is the issue we confront when weighing the merits of the church's public outreach, its evangelistic task, in a Western culture saturated by marketing. By marketing, I refer to all the activities that help organizations identify and shape the wants of target consumers and then try to satisfy those consumers better than competitors do. This usually involves doing market research, analyzing consumer needs, and then making strategic decisions about product design, branding, pricing, promotion, advertising, and distribution.

While researching Brand Jesus, I realized that the church faced unavoidable questions as it sought to maintain a public witness and evangelistic task in a consumerist culture. One is this: Should we market the church and the church's message? (In this article, I assume that our evangelistic message is about knowing Christ and being incorporated into his body. Thus, whether we are specifically encouraging people to consider Jesus or some aspect of the gospel message or to attend a particular church, we are practicing key aspects of evangelism.) In particular, can we use marketing techniques such as niche targeting and branding? Can we help but do so? Can we change the medium without affecting the message? Or does the medium of marketing itself taint our message, leaving us only to resist to the last breath any accommodation to our consumer culture?

The champions of better church marketing say that withdrawal and resistance are not options for a local church that seeks a public presence. We live in a commercialized culture that accepts that virtually everything is for sale. There is simply no way to be in the public arena without engaging in marketing. Even if you do not intend to market your church, that's how consumers are going to perceive your outreach. They will take it in through market-conditioned filters. If we ignore this fact, we will probably wind up doing bad marketing, and that doesn't do anyone any good.

So, unless we completely withdraw from any kind of evangelism, marketing is inevitable. And if marketing is the language of our culture, we might as well be fluent in it, right? After all, if you were a missionary in a foreign country, you would learn the language. Marketing is just the latest incarnation of classic evangelistic models such as persuasion and example.

Thus goes the argument. At the popular blog ChurchMarketingSucks.com, Joshua Cody wrote, "It's a privilege that in a world full of broken marketing and blatant lies, we get to sell the truth." From this perspective, the mistake would be to market the church poorly, which would make the church seem less than it is—like an undesirable brand—to an unbelieving audience....

+++ +++ +++

...There are indeed similarities. But evangelism and sales are not the same. And we market the church at our peril if we are blind to the critical and categorical difference between the Truth and a truth you can sell. In a marketing culture, the Truth becomes a product. People will encounter it with the same consumerist worldview with which they encounter every other product in the American marketplace.

Thus our dilemma: The product we are selling isn't like every other product—it isn't even a product at all. But if the gospel is not a product, how can we market it? And if we can't avoid marketing it, how can we keep from turning it into the product it isn't...?

+++ +++ +++

...Unfortunately, most evangelism in a consumerist society will seem like a sales pitch. But when you are marketing a product that isn't, it's important to know the difference between a church-centered mindset and one driven by individualistic market interests.

This requires recognizing the attributes and values of consumerism. The church can then intentionally develop practices of discipleship that cut against them, so that we will not unwittingly bow to the altar of Brand Jesus....

+++ +++ +++

The consumer who buys our marketing may well make Jesus his or her chosen brand, and the resulting zeal will look like passionate faith. Appearances deceive. Genuinely passionate faith is rooted in recognizing who Christ actually is. Brand zealotry, by contrast, is self-centered, because the supposed superiority of one brand over another depends on the brand devotee's enthusiasm. The zeal of the endorsement masks the inherent arbitrariness of the choice.

But the choice for Christ is not arbitrary. If a disgruntled Chevy man switches to Ford, Chevy loses and Ford gains; if we desert Christ in favor of another god, he is not diminished. Brand superiority is in the mind of the consumer, but Christ's divinity and worth are his own, regardless of what we think of him. He does not need our bumper stickers or T-shirts. These tell the world far more about who we are and what we like than they do about him.

Spiritual shoppers have no reason to think that Christianity is anything but one option among many. But the life of a holy church is a powerful witness to the contrary—perhaps most evidently in our celebration of the Lord's Supper, when we remember that the one we consume has already consumed us. The church reveals the supremacy of Christ in a world that denies his power when—crediting it all to God—we love the unlovable and forgive the unforgivable, reconcile seemingly intractable hatreds and rejoice even in sorrow, persevere in hardship and serve to the point of sacrifice, and baptize and teach instead of consume and discard....

+++ +++ +++

In other words, people who respond to church marketing approach Jesus as another consumer option. This is first and foremost a problem because it is blasphemy: We are talking about the incarnate Logos, not a logo. Additionally (in case blasphemy isn't bad enough), this should concern us because of the problems it creates for discipleship. Consumerism isn't just a social phenomenon—it's a spirituality. And it comes with spiritual habits and disciplines that conflict with the particular practices of the Christian life.

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...Consumerism is here to stay. The habits described above—self-creation, discontent, relativism, fragmentation—will become more dominant, not less, in years to come. That's the way of the globalized economy and ascendant transnational commercial interests. We cannot defeat our situation; we can only seek to live faithfully in it.

In order to do so, it's vital that we remember the true nature of Christ's church. Christians in every age have struggled to define the church, a difficult task because it is, uniquely, a divinely ordained human institution. So we use necessary similes: The church is like a family, a kingdom, a service organization, a lifeboat, a neighborhood, and—in our day—a business.

But problems begin when we define the church as a whole using a comparison that just describes one of its attributes: i.e., treating the church as a business with a brand to promote. And then, even though there are all sorts of ways the church isn't like a business, we begin to employ all the tools of commercial enterprise as though we were paying the body of Christ some compliment by treating it like a Fortune 500 company, with a bottom line, investor returns, supply chain, CEOS, market share, and so on. If we treat the gospel like a commodity, can we fault nonbelievers for thinking that the cross is just another logo?

But we also need to recognize that no matter what we do, consumerism will unavoidably define the context for how people view the church in our consumerist age. All communication will be perceived as marketing. All self-presentation, even church advertising, will be perceived as branding. And all outreach will be viewed as sales. There is nothing we can do to change this context.

All the more reason for us to defy expectations. Spiritual consumers will come to Christianity as do window shoppers at a mall, wanting a spirituality tailor-made to their preferences. They will want this because consumption is the only salvation they have ever known. They will bring all of their riches and perversely be unable to conceive of grace because they cannot imagine a thing that cannot be bought.

They will come before our stained-glass seeking a storefront in exactly the same way that people in Jesus' day came to him, searching for what they expected to find. Then they were looking for a crazy man, a teacher, a healer, a prophet, a revolutionary—and, at the end, a corpse. Today they are looking for a spiritual brand.

In Jesus' time, they found a living Messiah and Lord. They found the God for whom they had not even been looking. The question for us in our time is whether seekers will find the world-transforming body of the Lord, formed by the Spirit—whether, expecting something new to buy, they will instead be surprised by God.

Read the rest here.

Hat tip to Episcopal Cafe: The Daily Episcopalian